Why this nifty little thriller is so forgotten and nowhere to be found today
is a mystery. It's really a rather intriguing, if sometimes uneven, attempt at mixing Hitchcockian suspense with the kind of supernatural theater of the macabre one might associate with an old episode of Night Gallery. Prior to its release in theaters, Universal Studios generated considerable public interest with TV ads which prominently featured a scene depicting a little old lady in a runaway
wheelchair careening helplessly towards traffic (backwards yet!) down a particularly precipitous
slope of one of San Francisco's many hills. As a San Francisco resident at the time, these commercials made Eye of
the Cat the must-see movie of the summer of '69 as far as I was concerned.
To clarify, said “little old lady” is three-time Oscar-nominee Eleanor Parker, who was just 46 at the time. Although unfamiliar to me then, Parker, this being just four years after her glamorous turn as the Baroness inThe Sound of Music, was another talented actress "of a certain age" (a la Jennifer Jones, Joan Crawford, Lana Turner, Bette Davis, and Tallulah Bankhead) who found herself prematurely relegated to “horror hag” roles in youth-centric '60s thrillers that took as a given audiences finding women over the age of 30 to be as grotesque as Hollywood apparently did.
Eye of the Cat was one of the earliest films to exploit the subtle malevolence and flagrant creep-out factor of packs of animals. A trend that blossomed into a full-blown horror sub-genre in the '70s with films like Willard, Empire of the Ants, Kingdom of the Spiders, and the laughably non-threatening Night of the Lepus (giant bunnies!). I saw Eye of the Cat at San Francisco's Embassy Theater on Market Street, and could hardly contain my anticipation. Not being much of a fan of cats (that has since changed) the movie fairly gave me the willies, and, in short, scared the hell out of me...but that didn't stop me from sitting through it three times.This one scene, which owes more than a passing nod to Hitchcock, is enough to make Eye of the Cat a must-see |
To clarify, said “little old lady” is three-time Oscar-nominee Eleanor Parker, who was just 46 at the time. Although unfamiliar to me then, Parker, this being just four years after her glamorous turn as the Baroness inThe Sound of Music, was another talented actress "of a certain age" (a la Jennifer Jones, Joan Crawford, Lana Turner, Bette Davis, and Tallulah Bankhead) who found herself prematurely relegated to “horror hag” roles in youth-centric '60s thrillers that took as a given audiences finding women over the age of 30 to be as grotesque as Hollywood apparently did.
Gayle Hunnicutt as Kassia Lancaster "Just another beautiful girl with all the wrong values." |
Michael Sarrazin as Wylie "In good mirrors you can see that once I was disastrously beautiful." |
Eleanor Parker as Aunt Danielle (Aunt Danny) "Nowadays you can't depend on natural causes." |
Tim Henry as Luke "It's not a good idea to take cats lightly." |
In addition to this feline homage to Psycho, Eye of the Cat features an atmospheric score by Lalo Schifrin (Cool Hand Luke) with Bernard Herrmann overtones |
WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
Canines (the four-legged kind) can be scary in real life, but for a dog to scare me onscreen, it has to be either one of those dogs with a face like a fist (a Rottweiler or a Pit Bull) or one of those wolf-snout dogs like in Samuel Fuller's White Dog. Cats, on the other hand, merely have to be themselves. Cute or creepy,
cats introduce an element of uncertainty just by showing up, and they always
appear to be operating under their own mysterious, sinister agendas. This
calls to mind a Night Gallery episode
I once saw that made use of a quote from Samuel Butler’s novel, Erewhon: “Even a potato in a dark cellar
has a certain low cunning about him which serves him in excellent stead.” If ever
two words perfectly summed up my impression of cats, it’s the words “low
cunning.”
Pussy Galore
The animal wrangler/trainer for the armies of felines used in Eye of the Cat is the late Ray Berwick, who also served as the bird trainer on Hitchcock's The Birds. In 1986 Berwick shared his techniques in the well-received book The Complete Guide to Training Your Cat.
My long-held distrust of cats played into the effectiveness of Eye of the Cat the same way a childhood spent in Catholic schools played into my enjoyment of Rosemary’s Baby the year before: it wasn't compulsory, but it helped. And what I like about both films is that in their basic structure, they work perfectly fine whether one buys into the supernatural angle or not.
Eye of the Cat generates
genuine tension as a crime caper thriller, keeps you guessing as a
psychological suspense flick, and works your nerves as a supernatural horror
film about potentially pernicious pussycats. With so many plots to
juggle, Eye of the Cat can
perhaps be forgiven the mood-killing miscalculations of throwing in an obligatory '60s party scene and a lengthy “love montage.” (For some reason, the '70s was the
era of the romantic montage. This cheap and economic go-to device for writers
unable to plausibly convey a developing romance has ground many a promising film
to a grinding halt. Perhaps the worse offender being Clint Eastwood’s 1971 directorial
debut, Play Misty for Me, in which a pretty good suspense thriller takes
a 20-minute nap while Clint gives us a Carmel, California travelogue and infomercial
for The Monterey Jazz Festival.)
What's New, Pussycat? |
As a longtime fan of glamorous tough broads in movies, it’s obvious why Gayle Hunnicutt’s Kassia Lancaster is my favorite character in the film. She states early on, “I’m not afraid of anything!” and spends the rest of the movie proving it. Dangerous, self-assured, authoritative, and without a doubt the strongest, smartest character in the film; female characters of her stripe would become extremely rare in the '70s as male-dominated “buddy films” grew in popularity. The fantastic-looking Gayle Hunnicutt gives an assured performance whose measured severity plays nicely off of Michael Sarrazin's more easygoing passivity.
I love that we're introduced to Kassia as she's licking her fingers and grooming herself like a cat |
Eleanor Parker looks wonderful and is very good in an underwritten part which casts her unsympathetically with little foundation. Typed as a salacious older woman, Parker certainly doesn't embarrass herself as Jennifer Jones did in a similar role in Angel, Angel, Down We Go that same year, but in having already played a horny older woman on the make in 1965's The Oscar, one wishes the ceaselessly classy actress had found something else to do if this was the only kind of role Hollywood was throwing her way.
The loss of two-thirds of her lung tissue barely puts a crimp in Aunt Danielle's libidinous, incestuous urges. Here she's seen languishing in that oxygen tent from Harlow in what appears to be the bed from (I'm sure intentionally) Cat on a Hot Tin Roof |
THE STUFF OF FANTASY
Perhaps in an effort to convey his character's freewheeling ways, Michael Sarrazin spends a great deal of the film shirtless or with nudity artfully concealed. Similarly, dreamboat material co-star Tim Henry (bottom pic with Eleanor Parker) adds a touch of homoerotic interest to a film already overflowing with adultery, promiscuity and possible incest. Hooray for Hollywood in the '60s!
THE STUFF OF DREAMS
A rear-projection shot of San Francisco's Market Street. To the left, the Paris Adult Theater |
Vina Del Mar Park in Sausalito, just across the Golden Gate Bridge. The park was a big hippie hangout in the late '60s |
The site of the film's centerpiece scene is the ritzy Pacific Heights district of San Francisco. Specifically the hill on Octavia Street and Washington beside the landmark 1912 Spreckles Mansion. The top photo is as it appears today, below, a screencap showing how the wall looked before the overgrown hedges.
Eye of the Cat is no classic, but it's a dynamo of a thriller that doesn't deserve its relative obscurity. It certainly holds up for me after all these years, and still packs a punch despite my having overcome my own youthful antipathy toward cats.
"They do come back...." |